


Sing for Your Supper

by executrix



Category: Blakes7, Shakespeare Retold
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-09
Updated: 2011-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:30:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We know from canon ("Weapon", S203)that Blake had at least one clone. Cue up the comedy of errors...which calls for another set of twins, errr, clones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing for Your Supper

**Author's Note:**

> Headings are Rodgers & Hart song titles, mostly from "The Boys from Syracuse"; quotes are from "The Comedy of Errors."

_Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe._  
Falling in love with love is playing the fool.  
Caring too much is such a juvenile fancy,  
Learning to trust is just for children in school.

 **HE HAD TWINS (I)**  
Travis could hardly hear the music, over the pounding in his head. Any moment now, his nemesis would walk into the room, and he would be vindicated. Blake

would be lying dead at his feet.

The music swelled to a crescendo. And there was Blake, at the top of the staircase, his face impassive above his flattering olive leather waistcoat, his gait stately.

And there was Blake, at the bottom of the staircase, having tripped and gone arse over tit all the way down, his clear baritone "Oh buuuuugerrrr" echoing over the theremins and celestas.

Slowly, slowly, savoring the moment fully, Travis raised his arm as Blake's momentum evaporated and he thudded to a halt in front of Travis.

This is it, Travis thought. This is everything. This is the culmination. In just one more moment, I'll...Yeah, then what? Then what'm I going to do?"

That slowed him down just a hair. Just enough for this particular Blake, who had a lot in common with the other Blakes, to detect Travis' weakness and take

advantage of it. He grabbed Travis' foot, yanked with all his strength, and levered himself to standing just as Travis went flying to the ground. Then he put the boot in few times, viciously, and legged it out the side door.

Clonemaster Fen (not as green as she's cabbage-looking) came in the back door, cannily avoiding that death-trap of a staircase. She nudged at her writhing customer with the pointy toe of one boot.

"It's escaped!" Travis gasped.

"Well, Sonny, you can whistle for a refund," the Clonemaster told him.

**THE SHORTEST DAY OF THE YEAR**

_They say this town is full of cozenage:_  
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,  
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,  
Soul-killing witches that deform the body (I, ii, 97-100)

Blake shivered, drawing his cloak around him tighter in the wintry air. It was barely four o'clock, yet he could see little through the thick twilight.

Ephesus was a planet with a bad reputation. Certainly, it had and prominently displayed all sorts of mundane fraud and jugglery, cheats and mountebanks. The Find the Lady pitchmen jostled the streetwalkers, and many such-like liberties of sin could be located with little or no effort. All across the spaceways, one often heard whispers of sorcery and witchery and worse. Blake was fairly sure he didn't believe that bit.

As for his current mission, it could be a trap, of course--in his life, what couldn't?--but there had been the unmistakable ring of sincerity in the message from the wealthy woman (Code Name Melanie) who said she wanted to give him a million credits to assist the rebel cause. It warmed his heart to think that rebellion flourished everywhere, and he could be a part of it. Even those who had never met him, never so much as seen his vizimage, knew who he was and believed in him.

He planned to tell her that he didn't need the money, but he would be very grateful to see it used to buy weapons and build safe houses for the planet's native rebels and those who might need a refuge. As his instructions for the rendezvous dictated, he knocked three times on the front door, and began to whistle a popular tune as a recognition signal.

**HE AND SHE**

_Almost at fainting under  
The pleasing punishment that women bear_ (I, i, 45-46)

Rashel hurried to the front door, and opened it until just a thin line of foggy dusk showed through. She gasped. {{Gods!}} she thought. {{My husband! What's he doing here, so early? And why isn't he wearing the outfit he had on this morning?}}

Rashel had an easy answer for the last question: he must have been with some floozy. Gossip assigned him stashes of popsies all over town. It would be easy enough to keep a clean shirt and a razor in several pieds-a-Ephese. Rashel also had an easy solution to her current problem. There was one reliable way of shutting her husband up.

"Oh, very well," she said. "Come on up." Blake, quite surprised by the cold manner of his rebel contact, followed her inside the front door, up a vast spiral staircase richly covered in figured carpeting, and into a palatial bedroom.

Not bothering to illuminate more than a single bedside lamp, Rashel dumped the quilted raw silk bedspread and its litter of fur cushions onto the plushly carpeted floor, and unceremoniously removed her dress and threw it in the direction of a velvet-cushioned armchair made out of antelope horns. She sighed, lifted one corner of the fine linen sheet trimmed in a two-inch-wide border of handmade lace, and slipped underneath. "Come on, then," she said. "If you want to get your leg over, then do."

Bemused, Blake shook his head. It could be a clever ruse to separate him from his weapon (using that term in the sense of his Liberator handgun). He decided to keep his bracelet on--he had tested it only moments before--and save himself at the cost of a bit of transient embarrassment, if the worst came to the worst. Then again, it could be a somewhat unromantic expression of Melanie's admiration for his principled anti-Federation stand.

Or, yet again, it could be a local custom, their idea of hospitality, and refusal would lead to deadly anger. In Blake's experience, diplomatic missions were highly correlated with some sort of sexual activity. Perhaps this was a variant. As a means of assuaging local pride, it was infinitely more attractive than eating sheep's eyeballs.

So Blake unwrapped the cloak, hopped from foot to foot to remove his boots and socks, and doffed his trousers and pants. Even the brief glimpse he had seen of Rashel in her chemise abashed him. She still retained traces of unfashionable muscularity from her years as a bondslave, and she was slim and alarmingly lithe as a ferret. Blake, feeling suddenly middle-aged and desk-bound, left his shirt on as he joined her in the vast bed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see three Blakes and three Melanies in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. He closed his eyes, pulled in his stomach, and embraced her. He felt both wonderful, to be welcomed by this beautiful woman, and awful, because the whole odd encounter reminded him how lonely he had been, and how starved for touch (an even more poignant loss than the absence of pleasure in his methodical life).

All in a moment Rashel's hiss of irritation modulated into a gasp of surprise and then a moan. She felt as if she were on her honeymoon again, back when the joyful tenderness of mutual exploration hadn't yet been scrubbed away by the fire-hose of everyday exasperation.

**HE HAD TWINS (II)**

_I to the world am like a drop of water_  
That in the ocean seeks another drop,  
Who falling there to find his fellow forth,  
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself (I, ii, 35-38)

"Hoi, don't you ever give it a rest?" Reg Black asked his slave, who was industriously reading a work of improving literature (propped up against a chair) while scrubbing the floor of the dealership showroom.

"I try not to, sir, it's the only chance I have of coming up in the world, you see," said Rila Vestal.

"You've got no chance, squire, you're a slave."

Rila opened his mouth to point out that if he worked hard and saved the few pathetic groats that came his way, he could buy his freedom--after all, Reg's own missus had just paid to free her sister Luciana. He shut his mouth again, realizing that saying anything of the sort would be far from sufficiently humble. He probably wasn't supposed to know it anyway. So much of what a slave gleaned, whether materially or in the way of information, came from hanging about where he wasn't supposed to be.

**THIS CAN'T BE LOVE**

_One of these men is genius to the other;_  
And so of these, which is the natural man,  
And which the spirit? Who deciphers them? (V, I, 333-335)

No matter how many tactful hints he gave, Blake could not get Rashel to positively identify herself as agent-in-place Melanie. With a last kiss, with a puzzling (toRashel) "I'll never forget you," Blake dressed, and left the house in search of a way to get the mission back on target.

Blake decided to head back to the ship and check to see if there had been any further transmissions. By then, it was full dark, and he could scarcely see his hand in front of his face as he raised the bracelet to lip-level through the opening of his cloak.

Before he could contact the Liberator, a paralyzing beam from a small but powerful torch shone on his face. Dazzled, he could hear the heavy foot-falls of three men (persons? individuals?), but could see nothing of the creatures before him, much less whether they melted into the dark because of thick obscure cloaks or black uniforms. "Yeh, that's him," one of them said. "And that's it! Get it!"

Blake put up a good fight, but one resolute but sated rebel, the silly grin barely wiped off his face, is no match for three stout thugs, and eventually they dragged him to the alleyway next to the house. One of the thugs knelt on his shoulders, while a second kicked him and the supervisor removed his teleport bracelet.

No matter how often this happened, Blake always felt a surge of horror of helplessness added to being taken prisoner. Delilah! he thought angrily.

He was utterly astonished when his three--well, you couldn't call them captors--rolled him against the rubbish bins and then just stalked away, not a word exchanged after the initial exclamation.

Blake sat up, brushed some eggshells and coffee grounds off his cloak, and pondered the fact and implications of his being free and relatively unharmed. With the usual human impulse to drive off in search of the car keys one has just locked into the car, he raised his wrist again to contact the ship.

Once they reached the next street lamp, the three repo men stopped to examine their prize. "Oh, fucking hell," the leader said. "We were supposed to get that solid-furnezium wrist-chron with the diamond dial that Flash Harry couldn't be arsed to pay for. Not this bit of rubbish...I'm surprised it hasn't got Mickey Mouse on it."

"Well, that would be worth a bit," one of the thugs said. "If it was an original. Pre-Atomic, that would be."

"We'll just have to keep looking, is all," the leader said, stamping on the teleport bracelet and then drop-kicking its flattened remains into some shrubbery.

Cally, on teleport duty, heard the bracelet's dying squeal. "Come in, Blake...Liberator to Blake....this is Cally, can you hear me?" She shook her head. "Blake's in trouble."

"Wherefore is this night different from all other nights?" Avon asked, lounging against the junction between the corridor and the teleport bay. "All right, I'll go."

**SING FOR YOUR SUPPER [AND YOU'LL GET BREAKFAST]**

_The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit,_  
The clock has strucken twelve upon the bell;  
My mistress made it one upon my cheek:  
She is so hot because the meat is cold. (I, ii, 44-46)

Blake had grimaced when Avon tucked a couple of Bank of Ephesus hundred-credit notes into his shirt pocket. (During an earlier lull in mission activity, Avon and Jenna obtained a couple of tea chests of various local currencies by selling off the uglier objects in the Treasure Room. They were in perfect agreement that this should be done, but they squabbled for three solid days over the various gradations of "tacky," "vulgar," "horrible," and "hideous.")

But now, Blake couldn't disagree with (most of) Avon's accompanying, "Getting your head down someplace warm and dry, and getting a hot meal inside you when another idiotic plan has gone awry...priceless."

Which was the greater risk, Blake wondered--wandering about the streets until a patrol picked him up, or entering the bright lights of a hostelry that might demand identity documents? As far as Blake could tell, Cally's forgeries were quite good, but it wasn't his area of expertise.

It appeared that he found himself in quite a prosperous quarter of town, so there might not be any low hostelries where the clink of coin substituted for the buzz of magno-readers. But Blake had only the barest sketch map of Ephesus, and it wasn't detailed enough to point his way to the docklands or the spaceport quarter.

After Blake had wandered for a quarter of a mile or so without further incident, he saw the brilliantly illuminated façade of the Grand Victoria Hotel. He was hungry, tired, footsore, and mildly thumped about. But what really decided him to go in was the depth of his longing for a cigarette.

"Ah, good evening, sir," Alek, the maitre d' said, rumbling gently at the foot of a tiny step. Blake picked up the maitre d' and set it down at the higher level. It hummed gratefully. "Ex-ter-mi--that is, I'm sorry, sir, you seem to have met with an accident. Your usual table?"

"Why, yes," Blake said.

"Would you care to see the menu, or have your usual?"

"I've had too many surprises lately," Blake said. "The usual."

Moments later, a cocktail waitress appeared with a Rob Roy, the surprised cigarette girl gave him a box of gold-tipped, pastel cigarettes, and a waiter, moving as rapidly and smoothly as the tin horses on sticks in a racetrack game, appeared with a very, very rare huipterox g-bone, a heap of straw potatoes, and a Caesar salad.

Fifteen minutes later, a pot of strong coffee and a slab of thiurberry cheesecake were produced. The blue lights at the waiter's belt pack flashed in surprise. Mr. Black wasn't nearly ready for his dessert and coffee...in fact, he had so far taken only a few bites of the steak and eaten only half the salad. And he had smoked two cigarettes...the first the waiter had ever seen him smoke.

After an hour, when Blake pushed aside the plate with the last crumbs of cheesecake, he signaled for the waiter and held out one of the hundred-credit notes. "Oh, no, sir, put that away, your money is no good here," the waiter said. "We put it on your bill, so you can come in here with your friends and laugh and tear it up and we can debit the dealership's bank account. Will you be staying with us tonight? Of course your room is ready."

"Yes, I believe I will," Blake said. "Oh, and get this cloak cleaned by tomorrow morning, will you?" It was amazing what sort of things turned up, but Blake was not inclined to thumb his nose at them. Dealership, eh? At least that was a solid clue.

The waiter whistled, and a Decima bellhop appeared. "Room 703, by dawn tomorrow," the waiter told her. She chittered and raised her tiny pillbox hat in acknowledgment. Blake signed the check, with a very large and legible "Room 703" and a very small and illegible something-else, and pondered whether it is appropriate to tip robots. He decided that whoever they thought he was probably gave everyone a Winter Solstice present instead.

Blake strode to the front desk. "Key for 703, please."

"Why, of course, sir," the receptionist said, surprised. "I've been working here for yonks, of course I know you."

The elevator operator bowed. Once in the room, Blake took off his boots. They certainly could stand to be polished, but he was afraid to leave them outside the door in case he needed to make a quick getaway.

Blake flicked on the vidscreen. A load of rubbish, as usual. He opened the drawer next to the bed--nothing but a Gideon History of the Federation and a Book of Servalan. The bathroom was well stocked, including half a tube of shaving cream, a worn toothbrush in the toothmug and a hairbrush with one or two errant curly brown hairs in it.

There was a clean suit in the wardrobe--a little snug, but a passable fit. The gold-laced violet raw silk was not to his taste. A couple of white shirts, monogrammed "RB" on the breast pocket hung there too. There were two suits of pyjamas in the chest of drawers. Blake put on the blue striped ones, and was asleep moments after phoning down a 7 a.m. wake-up call and eating the chocolate mints that were on the pillow.

**YOU HAVE CAST YOUR SHADOW ON THE SEA (I)**

_O train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note_  
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears!  
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote,  
Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs (III, ii, 45-48)

Amidst the bustle of the Debarkation area of the spaceport, Luciana took a deep breath. She resolved to throw her shoulders back and gaze boldly at the world,after too many years of demurely averted glances.

There was a tug on her small pasteboard suitcase. She yanked the arm with the suitcase, and prepared to use the other to clout the medium-sized man with warm brown eyes, thinning light brown hair, and a slightly snubbed nose.

"Madame Luciana!" he whispered urgently. "I was waiting for you! Your sister set all this up!"

"Madame!" she said.

"Well, you're my mistress' sister, and if she's a lady that must make you a lady," Rila said.

"Oh, I suppose I must be," Luciana said wonderingly. "Were you going to carry my suitcase?"

"Course," he said, offended. "Poor but honest, that's me. Just ask anybody. I may be a Delta--or half of a Delta, if you consider the other clone of me floating around somewhere--but I don't owe nobody nothing" (he remembered the Teach Yourself to Speak Good Standard course he took three months earlier) "Anybody anything, that is. And I can't tell you how it does my heart good to see the mistress and you. If she can be free...if she can make a good marriage, and live in a lovely house..well, I live there too, but she lives upstairs and doesn't have to clean out the glycolene tanks."

After a short walk, Luciana said, "Here, hand me back that suitcase...you shouldn't have to carry it the whole way."

"Madame, I couldn't let a lady carry a suitcase when I was around, my arm would drop off in embarrassment if I so much as tried. Specially a lovely lady like you."

He realized that the compliment was a formal one--he hadn't so much as looked at her. When he gazed at her soft eyes and determined chin, so much like her sister Rashel's, he was instantly smitten. A quarter of a mile later, she insisted on sitting down at a café and buying him a peppermint Diablo to refresh him. She was charmed by the tiny, perfectly-shaped anecdotes of Ephesian life he told her. When they left the café, the suitcase was still in one of his clever hands, but his other hand clasped one of Luciana's.

**WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A MAN?**

_I see a man here needs not live by shifts,  
When in the streets he meets such golden gifts. _ (III, ii, 180-181)

Avon, rattling gently (a bracelet on each wrist, one around his ankle, two in his knapsack) teleported down an hour after dawn, to coordinates half a mile from the last place Blake had been seen--in case there was a permanent patrol posted. It was a glorious day by the time he reached the teeming marketplace, which was dominated by a gigantic billboard.

On the billboard was a picture of Blake, but not the haunted convict that the Federation would like people to see. No, this fellow wore an expensive suit, and his broad grin was both saccharine and sharkish. "Let Us Put the Black On You," the caption read. "at Reg Black's Very Reliable Used Spacecrafts!!!!."

Reg looked through the window of the steamroom in the Outer Planets Club. He was rewarded by a view of a perfectly bite-sized delicacy, with the black Irish coloring that always turned him on, and an incitement-to-riot mouth.

The new arrival seemed to be unaccompanied, and seemed to be headed toward the steamroom. Reg grinned (New Formula: 100% Shark!). Otherwise, there was not a sign of people.

Who wants people?

The steam cleared a little, and Avon could see...well, he knew it wasn't really Blake, but his heart stood still anyway. A Blake who laughed more, and drank more, and lifted weights, and washed down steaks with bottles of overpriced claret. A Blake wearing nothing but a towel, sitting on the top bench in the steamroom, out of the office in the middle of the day, not a care in the world.

"Hullo," Avon said. "I believe you're Reg Black?"

Reg nodded.

"I'm a free-trader. My partner, who bears a remarkable resemblance to you, was last heard from on your planet. I thought he might be in a spot of trouble, so I te...took the shuttle over here. I went to your place of business, and your clerk sent me over here."

"One of my clones, eh? I've been wondering what became of the rest of us. No, sorry, I haven't seen him. Are you staying in town, in case he turns up? Or if you'd like someone to show you around the place...the highlights and so forth..."

Avon felt a tingling warmth that had nothing to do with the steam, and out of the corner of his eye he detected a sideways glance rich in approbation. {{If I didn't know Blake better, I'd think I was being...Cruised. Then again, this isn't Blake. And if I can't have the real thing...}}

"I pride myself on my instincts. I can always tell a fella who likes to have fun," Reg told him.

Avon glanced meaningfully at Reg's wedding ring.

"Aw, Rashel's a grand girl. The best. But she's not enough for a red-blooded guy like me. There's a small hotel..." Reg continued. "I keep a room there."

"Thank you," Avon said. "But no."

"You like the way I look, don't you? Your eyes lit up when you saw me."

"As I say, your resemblance to my...partner...my business partner...is remarkable." {{But if I can't have the real thing...}}

"Just your business partner."

"Yes."

"Unrequited love's a bore."

"Love fell out with me," Avon said, giving him a smile-and-tonic with extra lime, all the time wondering if he was engaging in decency or masochism. He went back to the locker room, took a shower, put his clothes back on, and called up to the shift. Maybe with Vila on hand to help, the Blake hunt would be more successful.

**DEAR OLD SYRACUSE**

_This touches me in reputation,_  
Either consent to pay this sum for me,  
Or I attach you by this officer. (IV, I, 71-72)

At last the tedious (and teetotal) meeting of the Sons of Syracuse Association was over, and Reg could get back to his desk and pour himself a Scotch and soma. He cut through the town square, pausing only to hand out a few business cards to prosperous-looking individuals.

Smack-dab in the middle of the square, he ran into someone who not only looked just like him (but with a bad haircut) but was wearing his custom-made, guaranteed-unique violet raw silk suit and a pair of boots he wouldn't be caught dead in a ditch in.

"Hey, fella!" Reg said enthusiastically. "I'm Reg Black. Here's my card. I don't suppose you need a spacecraft? Today only--zero percent APR or two thousand credits cash back!"

"I HAVE a spacecraft," Blake said. "A bloody good one, in fact. The problem is getting in touch with it."

Reg was too well-trained to sniff out loud, but...well! The idea of calling one of those old free-trader rustbuckets a blood good spacecraft. "Say, I know who you are," he told Blake.

Blake tensed, not knowing whether the next part of the sentence would be "The child-molesting traitor whom I am about to sell for more money than I've ever imagined" or "The intergalactic Last Best Hope."

"You're one of my clones, aren't you? Come on over to the dealership, it's just the other side of the square, we'll have a jar and I'll tell you about the business. Or, I know, let me call the wife, she'll fix us a grand meal. Rila, show him Rashel's piccie." The man walking an unobtrusive pace behind his master took out Black's wallet and animated the holo.

"Why, she's lovely," Blake said. {{Ohhhhh shit....}}

"There he is!" yelled the head repo man, bringing his troops around the corner. "There he are!" he yelled, seeing the two together. "That's him! Or them's him!" "Let's get our heads down, squire," Reg said. "They want a little something of mine."

Avon and Vila ran in from the other side of the square. Reg leered cheerily when he saw Avon again. "Oh, we've met," he said to Blake. "Bit of all right, isn't he? If you want to keep Dollface around, you'd better give him a little something of yours...or, if I'm anything to go by, a biiig..."

Avon hastily threw a bracelet to Blake, hoping to be long gone before Reg could say anything else. Blake hoped to be long gone before the penny dropped. Avon

glanced over to Blake and then at Reg, signaling, Do you want me to give him a bracelet?

"I'm not having that," Reg said. "No more luxury wrist-chrons for me, least till the cards run my way again."

Vila looked at Rila, and they did a quadruple take. Vila cut his eyes over to Avon, then to Rila. Avon looked at Blake, who shrugged a "Why Not?" Avon threw the second bracelet to Vila, who snapped it on to Rila's wrist, and they were gone before the thugs thundered up to where they had just been standing.

"The bloke with the wrist-chron?" Reg said. "He went that-a-way, and pointed upward, in an economical fashion requiring the use of only two fingers. Then he decided he'd better be long gone before they figured out which Blake was which, so he headed home.

**YOU HAVE CAST YOUR SHADOW ON THE SEA (II)**

_The time was once when thou unurged wouldst vow_  
That never words were music to thine ear  
That never object pleasing in thine eye  
That never touch well welcome to thy hand  
That never meat sweet-savored in thy taste,  
Unless I spoke, or looked, or touched, or carved to thee. (II, ii, 112-117)

He was resigned to the usual right ear-bashing when he came through the door, so he was pleasantly surprised by Rashel's sweet, hesitant smile.

{{Yes, that was lovely,}} she thought. {{But marriage is more than four bare legs in a bed! If only we could get back to the time when we talked together, when we were friends, when this was a real home instead of a place to get clothes cleaned between adulteries. Why, how would he feel if I just went ahead and did it with everyone who took my fancy? He'd be furious. Thank the gods I have my political work. But what a shame that Blake never turned up--it would have been an honor just to meet him. But he must have been busy. The troubles of one little person don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.}}

"You look lovely, my dear," Reg said. She was going to be furious that he would try to fob her off with rubbish like that, but then she responded to the genuine affection in his tone. {{It's a funny old world, isn't it?}} Reg thought. {{Nice to have something you can count on.}} He preferred to gloss over most of the events of the day in silence, so he asked Rashel about her day.

She gulped. "Reg, you probably don't know this, but I've been saving up from the housekeeping money, well, for years. And I saved up enough to buy my sister Luciana's freedom. She's here, now, in the kitchen. Having supper with Rila--they seem to have hit it off."

Reg initiated the steps for a fit of torrential anger, then reconsidered. "It's nice to have a family," he said, snuggling Rashel against his shoulder. "Someone like you...life can be a lonely place, otherwise. {{And if her sister is half as pretty as Rashel...wonder if she's older or younger?}}

Rashel slid her arm around his waist, reminiscently. That long-alienated touch--and various aspects of his day--caught up with Reg. "I don't suppose we could...you know, we might...you and me..." he said forlornly, just on the off-chance.

"Oh, yes, my darling!" Rashel said. "But only if you make it just like the last time!" That puzzled Reg--he wasn't even quite sure who'd been President of the Federation the last time--but he determined to do his best.

**HE HAD TWINS (III)**

_I to the world am like a drop of water_  
That in the ocean seeks another drop  
Who failing there to find his fellow forth,  
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. (I, ii, 35-38)

"Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother," Vila said, entranced, gazing at his clone. He had always wanted a family, and this gave much faster results than the normal terran methods, although it also lacked certain short-term advantages of that method. "I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth."

"Youth!" Rila said.

"You can take this honesty bit too far, y'know," Vila said.

And, hand in hand, not one before another, they went up to the Liberator. After a long session of Vitazade (with and without adrenaline and soma), they argued about the money that Vila gave his clone to buy his freedom.

"Tainted money," Rila said. Twice-tainted, Vila thought...taint yours and taint mine. But it's yours, now it is.

"No, it isn't. It's my salary, like. They have to pay me, sort of. Blake couldn't go around having slaves on the Liberator, could he?"

"But your salary for what?"

"Oh, rebelling, blowing things up, safecracking, the usual..."

"I can't say much in favor of scrubbing floors, and keeping the books at the dealership, but at least it's honest work...well, the books aren't but that's not my fault...I earn my crust of bread. And I don't hurt anybody."

"We don't hurt anybody if they don't deserve it, or at least they're standing bloody close to someone who does."

"Vila, no. Let's not fall out over it, when we've just found each other."

{{I can't believe someone would turn down easy money like that,}} Vila thought. {{I mean, he didn't have to do anything bad for it. Didn't have to do anything for it. That'd be about as likely as Avon turning down a guaranteed free jump.}}

"Why don't you stay around here?" Vila said. "I can teach you a useful trade, there's usually something to thieve, from all sorts of people and aliens, never goes out of style."

Rila shuddered. "It just goes against my nature, that's all. Anyway, I'd best be getting back to Ephesus, you know. Cos there's something there for me."

_All endeth ill,  
Jack hath not Will_


End file.
